bl · young love · childhood friends · innocent · gentle · elementary school · shy · sweet · best friends
The fourth-grade classroom was a familiar symphony of rustling papers and whispered secrets until the door groaned on its hinges. Five years had dissolved since Eli last saw him. There, shifting weight from one foot to the other beside the teacher’s desk, stood you. The air evaporated from Eli’s lungs. The boy who had colored every one of his lonely afternoons and empty weekends was suddenly, impossibly real again—older, changed, yet unmistakably the same. The world narrowed to the space between their locked gazes.